Jay Beagle of the Arizona Coyotes is held back by linesman Jonathan Deschamps after a fight with Troy Terry of the Anaheim Ducks during their NHL game at Gila River Arena in Arizona on April 1.Christian Petersen/Getty Images
The NHL’s old business model was, in part, selling violence. You came for the goals and stayed for the fights. Or maybe the other way around.
When fighting fell out of fashion, that left a content hole to fill. Hockey’s solution? Less fighting, but a lot more talking about what little fighting there is.
The latest outrage – and what used to be a regular Tuesday night has turned to DEFCON 1 outrage every time it happens (again) – is Jay Beagle vs. Troy Terry.
The outbreak of old-timey lesson learnin’ at the end of Friday’s Coyotes/Ducks game was an example of an originalist reading of the Code. The Ducks beat the metaphoric crap out of the Coyotes, 5-0. So Beagle beat the literal crap out of a Duck.
The proximate excuse was a tame poke-check by Trevor Zegras on the Coyotes goalie. Beagle cross-checked Zegras to the ice. Zegras’s teammate, Terry, pushed Beagle. Beagle accepted his invitation.
Terry had never been in an NHL fight and it showed. His biggest mistake was remaining upright. Beagle – who has a lot more experience with this kind of thing – took it to mean he should punch harder. By the end, Terry’s face had been tenderized and the Hockey Outrage-o-Tron was beginning to click and whir.
All lopsided hockey fights create a panic these days, but to catch widespread attention a few conditions must be met.
The aggressor must be representative of the ancient and discredited values of extreme masculinity. The victim must be a high-skill player who stands on street corners waiting for old ladies to help across. The fight must be especially brutal and the results hard to look at.
Remember the scene from Raging Bull where Robert De Niro sneers at a pulped opponent, “He ain’t pretty no more”? That’s the mood you’re looking for.
Most importantly, there should be ample illustration of a collision between the Old NHL and the New NHL. This isn’t someone losing their temper. It’s a clash of competing value systems.
If Zegras’s poke-check-that-wasn’t was the inciting incident of Beagle’s frontal assault, it wasn’t the cause. He’d set this confrontation into motion a couple of hours earlier.
If he isn’t the best player in the NHL, Zegras must be the most fun to watch. He treats professional rinks like driveways. He’s always looking for a cool, new way to score.
In the first period of Friday’s game, Zegras pulled one of his specialties – a “Michigan” goal. He carried the puck around the net, lifted it onto the face of his stick blade, and trusted centrifugal force to stick it there while he wrapped it into the net from behind.
It’s one of those goals that look impossible in real time and easy in slo-mo. But if it was easy, people besides Trevor Zegras would do it.
Now If I’d scored a goal like that, I’d run screaming from the rink and then retire. Zegras only rubbed his fingers together in a “gimme money” gesture. You’d have to call it remarkable restraint.
But the Coyotes were clearly not pleased at being made to look foolish by the NHL’s most electric young talent. Going after Zegras directly would be too bold. So two periods later and with half-an-excuse to do so, the Coyotes went after the Ducks’ top goal-scorer instead.
If that had been it – a blowout game ended by a bad fight – it wouldn’t be that big a deal. But two more things happened.
The Coyotes home broadcast team includes Tyson Nash. Nash was the sort of player who made his living enforcing the Code. He’s not just a representative of the Old NHL. He’s a board member.
“That’s the problem sometimes with these young players,” Nash said right after Beagle delivered his beating. “You wanna embarrass guys? You wanna skill it up? You better be prepare to get punched in the mouth.”
It’s hard to argue with the analysis part of that statement. This was plainly the Coyotes’ revenge on the Ducks for being better than them at hockey.
As far as tone (“the problem … with these young players”), what else would you expect from Nash? He is a creature of his professional upbringing.
But this pushed the fight to the top of the media charts – an obvious example of the defeated armies of yesteryear challenging the forces of progress.
Zegras reinforced that impression with his postgame comments. Refusing to say Beagle’s name, Zegras worked himself to a proper froth: “For the player who did it, I think he should be humiliated and I think he should be punished.” Except there was a word before “punished” you don’t often hear in hallway hockey chats.
A direct call-out? From one of the hottest young things in hockey? Against a dinosaur likely to rip his head off if it comes to that? That’s the jackpot.
That’s how you turn the relative absence of fighting into AAA-rated fight content for the new and improved NHL.
The most reliable way to judge the rightness or wrongness of something that happened in a sports entertainment context – did it make people stop watching? Are they more or less interested in what happens next?
Sports is about morality plays, not actual morality. If more people are inclined to continue watching and continue spending, then whatever happened is correct, ipso facto.
With that in mind, fighting hasn’t been reduced, so much as it has been repurposed. Allowing just a little of it, and then arguing over whether that little should be referred to The Hague as a crime against humanity, is a key driver of interest.
People will watch the Beagle/Terry fight. They’ll either clutch their pearls or cheer while they listen to Nash. They’ll do one of the same two things with Zegras while he pulls his locker-room Howard Beale. And then they’ll go online to yell at each other about it. The league either will or won’t impose additional punishment, and then we get to do it all over again.
A fight used to be a 30-second thrill. Now it’s a week’s worth of internet gold for a league that has trouble creating viral moments. If there’s any progress happening here, that’s it.
Cathal Kelly